Front Tire Size

Nite Moves said
Ive just gone through this issue myself. Pain in the ***. Thankfully i have a friend in the tire buisness . I have 17inch rims all way around 7inch wide with a 4inch back space. I have 245's by 50 on the rear and i tried 215/50's on the frt.To wide. I just got one to try a 205/45/ and it clears the lower aspect of the fender, JUST. This is a used tire so a new one will be a touch taller. I may have to trim just a touch of the fender. Hind sight, 17 on the back looks great but i could have saved time with 15s on the frt. More tire options JMO

More tire options in 15"? Uh, no. There are about 10x as many tire options for 17" rims. What is there in 15"? BFG T/A's, Cooper Cobra's, maybe a few Kumho's or generic brands with 400+ tire wear ratings depending on the width? What you should have done was get a 17x8" with 5" - 5.6" of backspace for the front. With the 8" rims 245's would have been easy even for the front, and there are about 90 different choices in a 245/45/17 on TireRack alone. Heck with a 5" backspace you could probably have run the same backspace front and rear, and just used a small spacer in the back if it got close on the springs. With an 8 3/4 rear and BBP axles you could run 17x8 with 5.25" of backspace all the way around. 245/50/17 is an odd size.

15x7 with 4.25" of backspace was the factory rim size, and is the MINIMUM amount of backspace you want to run with a 225, or even a 215 on some cars. With only 4" of backspace a 215 is max, and even then some cars might need some adjusting or trimming.

A 15" rim is limited in backspace because of the brake clearance, about the most you can run is 4.5" or maybe 4.75" depending on the style of the rim and type of brakes. With a 17" rim you can run as much as 5.6" of backspace on most rims, making a 245 or even a 255 wide front tire a piece of cake.

But for the OP with the SBP set up, it will be difficult to find much in the way of backspace options because of the 5x4" bolt pattern.